Badge Farming Advice

[Silly Gooooose]

So I have only been 70 for a week, so I haven't had too much time to try, but I am having a bit of trouble getting badges. I did a heroic slave pens (easiest heroic IMO) and it failed miserably. Got to those 2 guards that have the spell reflect bubble, and hit for a ton. I would like to blame my tank ('http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Bloodscalp&n=Skarrag'), but I also don't want to be trying to blame my short coming on some one else. Sooooo as an outside, what do you think my problem is, and what do you suggest?

I was PvP ele, and I had 1 of the 4 shamans just spam heal the tank with healing wave. (replaced the lightning bolt with healing wave, and made him spam heals as the other 3 spammed deeps.) It did good keeping him up, that wasn't the problem. The problem was I would get agro from one of the extra mobs. He would end up loosing agro and then the mob would come over and rape me. I'd like to say hes just sorta new at tanking, so hes not doing something right, and therefor losing agro, butttt.... he says he was spamming swipe the whole time. What else can we do?

I was thinking maybe having him get a bit more gear (and myself) and then having 1 of my shamans spec resto. His heals not generating as much threat, plus the agro the tank will get from earth shield. Also as a last ditch effort I might stick my pally outside the instance and make him buff us all with salv, though that would be such a pain.

What do you all think?



Also, what do you do if you want to pve, and all your guildies are afraid to take you anywhere? Maybe I am just rushing too much, I did just ding 70. meh.
(on a side note, do your shamans continually fly up when you tell them all jump/fly upwards, so you can fly. When I hit jump for them to fly up, they just bug and continually fly up.)

[Kaynin]

I run SP, UB, Ramps and MT with a 1.5k druid tank myself now, dinged 70 a little over two weeks ago.

I basicly use all my four toons to dps, and when the tank needs a heal, I throw 4x lesser healing waves. And continue to dps.

[Silly Gooooose]

Hmm, can you link his armory? I was doing like you at first, but he was just dropping way too fast.

On a side note, i've got a question about haste.

Is haste any good if you've only got it on 1-2 pieces? Or if I only plan on having max 2-3 pieces with haste, should I just get crit. (though I guess being that I have 4x ToW, for pve anyway.) To the shaman forums!

[wowphreak]

Yer tank needs to switch targets and swipe and use some of his other abilities on each critter that got pulled.
In a way its real close to how a warrior has to keep aggro.

Another thing that might help is getting something like omen to see whose got how much aggro.

[Kaynin]

http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Sporeggar&n=Age (The tank I run heroics with.)

http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Sporeggar&n=Canika (My gear, almost the same on all four.)

Edit: Actually, he's in his catform DPS gear right now on armory, that's not his tanking gear. >.>

Oh and, I tend to give him 5-10 seconds to build up aggro. Otherwise I keep pulling stuff from him. In MT, I use my earth elementals on all pulls with 2 or nexus stalkers. (one on each pull.) Nexus stalkers are the hardest trash I encoutnered so far.

Ramps is the easiest probably, second boss, no one goes melee range. Druid just picks up adds while not getting too close to my chars, while I chuck down groundings whenever they are up and dps like mad. End boss, he tanks close to me in grounding totem range while I keep refreshing them asap and it's an easy fight then.

Second easy I find SP, the hardest bits are the two packs with four of them crawling bugs. Those trash hits hard. I nuke one down quick, tank picks up other three, while I nuke the second asap and then heal. Sometimes I have to heal sooner. But I try to down two before I need to heal. I sometimes also drop a earthy there on those packs. The mobs that do spell reflect arent too hard, just have to nuke one down quick, then take your time. Just blast through spell reflect on the first one, but the second one you can go easier, heal a bit etc while spell reflect is up.

On some other trash, kill melee mobs first, except the soothsayers, always kill soothsayers first if they're int he packs.

Ehm, that's basicly SP. On and use poison cleansing totems at intervals on end boss. :p Mmmmh, UB is pretty easy, actually, there's nothing that relaly felt hard. Tank the mobs that grow and do that aoe leech at a distance from yoru shammies. We grouped up once on a group like that and barely made it out alive. :p

All packs with 4 or more mobs, I tend to nuke one target before it can reach me and the tank just picks up the others.

[pinotnoir]

you clear h mrt on your 5man? I stepped in there with my pally tank on normal and got owned on the first pack of trash. Had like 4 things nuking my tank. When you drop earth elementals how do you heal them? Everytime I drop one they die in two hits it seems.

Here is my druid tank.
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Magtheridon&n=Shenlong

[Kaynin]

The druid I'm with moonfires secundary targets while picking up the main in bear form. Sometimes he opens with hurricane on bigger packs, it's pretty silly, but it does work. xD

And what is h mrt? >.> Magister's Terrace? I've not done that one on heroic... yet. with MT I means Mana Tombs. Mgt is what people on my server refer to as Magister's Terrace. :p

[kayb]

You gotta understand something about aggro and threat. When you pop heroism, trinket-crit that lightning bolt/chainlightning/healing and go to town, no tank in the universe will be able to outthreat you, unless you have the benefit of blessing of salvation for instance and/or have a pve spec with threat reduction talents. He may spam swipe until his claws are totally gone, it wont change the fact that your TPS (Threat-per-second) is higher than his. If he tanks both the reflect guards with one of your pvp specced shammies spamming weak heals on him, he WILL die sooner or later, or your healing TPS will surpass his TPS and you will die instead.

The trick is to reduce the amount of healing needed as fast as possible, which means to dispose of one guard quick. Pop your heroism and go to town, even use a NS lightning bolt on the first one to save a second dps time. 4-5 LB and a CL later the first one should be pretty dead. Now you can just kill the other one controlled. I for example have enough dps to kill both of them long before they even think about shielding.

I use this macro on one of my guys, all have 40/0/21 spec (you could of course heal with ie. 2 guys, but you'll be hampering your dps too much, and it's not really needed if you use heroism and cooldowns on the harder mobs): /cast [target=targettarget, help] Lesser Healing Wave; Lightning Bolt.

What this macro does: It checks whether or not my target is targeting anyone (unaggroed mobs have no target). If my target isnt targeting anything, it will shoot Lightning bolt at my current target. It could just as well be a simple /cast Lightning Bolt macro. If however my target is targeting something the [help] argument will find out whether or not I can help my targets target in any way. If I can help my targets target, in this macro I choose to cast Lesser healing wave. If I cannot help my targets target, I will still shoot lightning bolt.

Practical usages. I want to heal whoever got aggro, but if noone has aggro I want to utilize the full dps potential of my group. For me, or for you for that matter, it doesnt really matter much if one of your shammies has to tank something for a few seconds. You still probably got close to 10k armor so you'll not go down in 1 swing. And since your druid tank got all kinds of nice things to pull outta his pocket, you'll not be in danger for long. A single lesser healing wave or two will probably save you until your friend has taunted or stunned the mob or whatever.

Typically I start a fight with 2 lightning bolts (my target hasn't targeted anything until about the time the 2nd LB lands. With heroism I can cast 3 LB's before my target targets something), then I continue with a CL, before going back to LB spam. Now however, my target is angry at whomever critted the most, so I'll need to heal that target. So the shammy with the /cast [target=targettarget, help] Lesser Healing Wave; Lightning Bolt macro will now heal whomever the mob targets. If for example I pull multiple mobs and some of them start attacking searing totems, and I decide to nuke this target, the macro will fire lightning bolts since you cant [help] a totem in any way.

Just slot that macro in instead of your normal lightning bolt spam button for any of your guys. I use my main so I can quickly abort unneeded heals before they're cast to save mana, and to retain the ability to pot mana pots when needed, and yeah - they are needed when your spamhealing on heroism/bloodlust vs some of the bosses with lots of hitpoints. Warchief Kargath for example. Be amazed, it worked wonders for me anyway. Good Luck!

Edit: Just a couple of things more. This will naturally heal the shit outta your Earth Elementals as well, and make them last alot longer vs the tougher bosses. Another benefit of this nuke tactics is that your tank will have time to get ahead of you on threat on the mobs that you arent nuking. In the case of the reflect guards in SP, your tank will probably need to help you dps down the first target if your dps with heroism/cooldowns still isnt good enough to finish the mob.